Three years ago, Saeed Malik left San Francisco with a vision for how to bring literacy to poor schoolchildren in his native Pakistan. Now he has returned to ensure that his bookmobile program serving 5,000 students every week stays afloat.

Malik, the former director of the U.N. Food Programme in Eastern Europe, started the Bright Star Mobile Library in May 2011. One day each week, one of four ambulances-turned-bookmobiles visit first- through sixth-grade students at 20 rural schools outside the capital city of Islamabad.

"When you go to the school and see the children reading, it's electrifying," said his wife, Siddiqa.

The San Francisco-based Asia Foundation, a nongovernmental organization promoting development in Asia, helped Malik launch the program with a $10,000 donation.

"Without that support, the operation wouldn't have started," Malik said.

Malik made his case earlier this week for further support from the foundation. Acquiring books isn't the issue - the San Francisco Public Library has donated 500 children's books and pledged 300 more to go with the 2,000 books provided by the foundation and the National Library of Pakistan.

But recently, the program doubled its number of green-and-yellow U.N.-donated Land Cruisers from two to four, and Malik calculates it will cost $30,000 a year to keep the vehicles fueled and drivers paid.

It all started when Malik retired in 2004 and returned to Pakistan. What he found was a country very different from the one he left 35 years earlier.

"Change was not for the better. There was a radicalization of society," he said, recalling a meeting he had with a group of schoolchildren, almost all of whom aspired to be "freedom fighters." "The best way to tackle this radicalism that is taking hold of this country is through education."

The literacy rate for Pakistani adults is 56 percent, according to the United Nations, and the poor children Malik seeks to help have very little access to books in Urdu or English, the country's official languages. Malik estimated that 85 percent of schools he visited had no libraries, and the ones that did contained only religious magazines or a small cabinet of books locked in a principal's office.

"I was quite horrified, but not really shocked," he said.

Malik said he's seen efforts to build libraries in schools, but a lack of resources for maintenance meant that they rarely lasted. While on an annual trip to San Francisco in 2009 to visit his daughter, he got the chance to ride in one of the library's bookmobiles as it visited the Noriega Child Development Center in the Outer Sunset.

Library Mobile Outreach Manager Katrin Reimuller, who rode with Malik that day, excitedly pointed out a donated book from the San Francisco Public Library in one of Malik's slides during his presentation Tuesday to the Asia Foundation.

"It just makes me so proud," she said. "I think him seeing our children's bookmobile in action made him realize he had the right idea."

For now, children can't take books home because he doesn't have the resources to replace large numbers of lost or damaged books. Younger children have story time with a program volunteer, while their older peers can look through books individually. The next step is to leave some books behind with teachers and eventually let fifth- and sixth-graders take them home. The students he serves are often children of domestic servants and in families displaced by a 2005 earthquake that left 3.5 million homeless. He said teachers have reported an improvement in grades and children's English vocabulary since the program started.

"The families say, 'We knew these books existed, but were for another level of society,' " Malik said. "They are as bright as anyone else, they just haven't had the opportunity."